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Thursday, May 18, 2017

Without generally recognized professional credentials, can the higher
education CIO be called a "professional" leader in information
technology? Or should we consider the job as descriptive rather than a
career stage in a recognized profession? Does it even matter?

Photo: Kyle Johnson

"What skills does a CIO in higher education need, and what evidence might
demonstrate possession of those skills?" notes Kyle Johnson, Dean for Information Technology & Services, Chaminade University of Honolulu.

Photo: EDUCAUSE Review

A recent discussion on an
e-mail list I follow (yes, I still subscribe to and participate in
e-mail lists) caused me to think about this question anew. With
permission, here's part of what a colleague wrote:

"A related question that I sometimes ponder is whether CIO-hood is a
genuine profession. As professionals (doctors, lawyers, librarians, and
others) often remind me, a 'professional is someone who has completed
extensive and rigorous training in order to obtain generally recognized
credentials to practice in a specific field.' CIOs, on the other hand,
come from a wide variety of backgrounds and, while there are graduate
programs that provide concentrations in IT management, there is no
widely accepted credential for CIO-hood. I've known CIOs with doctoral
degrees, master's degrees, bachelor's degrees, and no degrees
whatsoever. And, at least in my experience, degrees don't seem to be
correlated with CIO success. So I guess my question back to you is,
*should* there be a generally accepted training program and credential
for CIO-hood?"

My first experience with a professional certification was in 1993 when I
became a Certified Apple Repair Technician. I was one of two CARTs in
my location, and this allowed the company to do Apple warranty repairs. I
later also became a Certified Novell Administrator (CNA), mostly
because my company needed a certain number of CNAs to get a reseller
status they wanted. So by 1994 I was a two-time professional — and
everything "professional" about my career has been downhill since.

After moving to higher education IT, I had a track record of continuous
growth and improvement that helped the organization succeed and thrive,
attended conferences that expanded my knowledge and network
exponentially — and garnered absolutely no professional certifications.
My professional downward spiral continued for over a decade until I
landed my first CIO appointment in 2007, at which point I had evidently
hit rock bottom and joined the amateur ranks permanently.

I have served as CIO at three different institutions, each of which has
required a different set of skills. Some CIO positions are technical:
you work right next to the other IT staff on much of the day-to-day
technical work. Others are general: you set direction and mentor staff,
but the staff members do most of the operational work. Some are utility
oriented: you keep the network running and the servers on. Others are
partnerships with the "business" side of the house: these are process
and mission driven. Most are some combination.

While I long to be considered a professional, I'm hard pressed to say
what a CIO certification in higher education would look like. If it
covers only the core things that every CIO position probably has in
common (leading an organization, managing staff, etc.) then it seems too
watered down to call a CIO certification. If it covers more,
certification as a CIO risks having multiple different specializations
(large public, small public, R1 private, religiously affiliated private,
community college, etc.).

At the end, if I were putting together a certification program, I would
want to make sure that people in the CIO role (or interested in it)
have:

a good core of leadership, management, and communication skills;

a broad enough understanding of IT to listen, ask good questions
(and understand the answers), and evaluate impacts of decisions;

a passion for learning new things (and a tolerance for failure while learning them);

a social presence and a desire to contribute to the profession; and

the self-awareness to understand what kinds of institutions will
match what they're looking for in a CIO role and the ability to figure
that out during the interview process.

Of those, the last is perhaps the most important and most overlooked.Read more...

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.